Arctic thaw and the politics of passage

Gwynne Dyer, The Straits Times 17 Sep 09;

EARLY next week, two German-owned container ships will arrive in Rotterdam from Vladivostok in the Russian Far East, having taken only one month to make the voyage. That is much faster than usual - but then, they did not take the usual route down through the South China Sea, past Singapore, round the bottom of India, through the Suez Canal (pay toll here), across the Mediterranean and up the west coast of Europe. They just went around the top of Russia.

It is the first-ever commercial transit of the North-east Passage by non-Russian ships, and it shortens the distance and duration of the sea trip between East Asia and Europe by almost a third. It is the melting of the Arctic sea ice that has made it possible, although, for the moment, it is possible only for a couple of months at the end of the summer melt season, when the Arctic Ocean's ice cover has shrunk dramatically. But it is a sign of things to come.

The voyage is more evidence that climate change is well under way, and will strike the Arctic region hard. But it also shows that all the fuss about the North-west Passage is irrelevant.

It is the North-west Passage, another potential short cut between Europe and East Asia that goes through the Canadian Arctic archipelago, that got the attention in the past few years. Although ice-breakers have traversed it from time to time, no ordinary commercial ship has ever carried cargo through it. But when the Russians put on their little propaganda show at the North Pole two years ago, the Canadian government had kittens.

In 2007, Mr Artur Chilingarov, a Russian scientist famous for his work in the polar regions and personal Arctic adviser to then Russian President Vladimir Putin, took a mini-sub to the North Pole and planted a Russian flag on the seabed. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper immediately flew to Iqaluit in the high Arctic and responded with a rabble-rousing speech.

'Canada has a choice when it comes to defending our sovereignty in the Arctic,' he said. 'We either use it or lose it. And make no mistake: this government intends to use it.' He then announced a programme to build six to eight armed Arctic patrol vessels to assert Canadian control over the North-west Passage, and a deep-water naval base on Baffin Island to support them.

'I don't know why the Canadians reacted as they did,' Mr Chilingarov said a few months later in Moscow, and on the face of it he had a case. After all, Russia has no claims over any land or water body that might conceivably belong to Canada, and Canada makes no claim on the North Pole. But Mr Chilingarov actually understood the game that Mr Harper was playing quite well.

Canada's dispute over sovereignty in the North-west Passage is actually with the United States, not with Russia. The Russians have absolutely no interest in the North-west Passage, since they have their own rival North-east Passage. But the US used to believe that the North-west Passage could be very useful if it were ice-free, so Washington has long maintained that it is an international waterway which Canada has no right to control.

Canada disputes that position, pointing out that all six potential routes for a commercially viable North-west Passage wind between islands that are close together and indisputably Canadian. But Ottawa has never asserted military control over the North-west Passage until now, because to do so would risk an awkward confrontation with the US. However, if it can pretend that it is building those warships and that naval base to hold the wicked Russians at bay, and not to defy the Americans...

That is Mr Harper's game, and he now visits the high north every summer to re-assert Canada's sovereignty claims. But in the end, it will make no difference, because the North-west Passage will never become a major shipping route. The North-east Passage is just too much easier.

The problem for Canada is that all the routes for a North-west Passage involve shallow and/or narrow straits between various islands in the country's Arctic archipelago, and the prevailing winds and currents in the Arctic Ocean tend to push whatever loose sea ice there is into those straits. It is unlikely that cargo ships that are not double-hulled and strengthened against ice will ever get insurance for the passage at an affordable price.

On the other hand, the North-east Passage is mostly open water (once the ice retreats from the Russian coast), and there is already the major infrastructure of ports and nuclear-powered ice-breakers in the region. If the distances are roughly comparable, shippers will prefer the North-east Passage every time - and the distances are comparable.

Just look at the Arctic Ocean on a globe, rather than in the familiar flat-earth Mercator projection. It is instantly obvious that the distance is the same whether shipping between Europe and East Asia crosses the Arctic Ocean by running along the Russia's Arctic coast (the North-east Passage) or weaving between Canada's Arctic islands (the North-west Passage).

The same is true for cargo travelling between Europe and the west coast of North America. The North-west Passage will never be commercially viable.

The writer is a London-based independent journalist.